Undisclosed Desires
by AnUnhealthyUchihaObsession
Summary: He was not sure why he decided that he would attempt to save her, but once the idea had popped into his head, it was impossible to get out. Clove/Peeta
1. Chapter 1

He was not sure why he decided that he would attempt to save her, but once the idea had popped into his head, it was impossible to get out. She lay on her side, her eyes wide and frantically looking around. Cato, her ally, had abandoned her in the search for Thresh, the reason she was dying in the first place.

Peeta had never liked her, and if the situation had been different, he probably would have turned and run away, but now, when she looked uncharacteristically frightened and her eyes were beginning to drop, he just didn´t have the heart. Peeta looked around the meadow on which the cornucopia was placed, searching it for anybody alive before making a decision and dashing to her side.

His hands searched her hair and found the huge chunk of stone that was embedded in her pale skin. On the count of three he tore it out which caused a more heavy flow of blood to stream down her neck and face. Looking at the stone in his hand, Peeta was happy for the first time that she was unconscious. The stone was warm in his hands and utterly disgusted by it he threw it as far away as he could, not bothering to look where it landed.

He frantically looked around for anything to wrap her head with, but when he didn´t find anything he braced himself and tore of a huge piece of fabric from the left leg of his pants. Peeta tried his best to lift her head up gently and then wrapped the fabric tightly around her head so that it covered her forehead before securing it with a knot. It looked terrible and the clothing was already growing damp from the blood.

"Please don´t die." He murmured before getting up on his feet and heading back in the search for more medicine. District 2´s bag lay on the ground a couple of meters away and it was filled with food and other objects. Peeta finally breathed a sigh of release when his fingers came in contact with a metal cylinder which had a label that said _Wound Closer. _Inside there was some sort of injection thing which was filled with a clear blue liquid.

He walked back to Clove and stuck it in her skin without a second thought. Hopefully it would have hit some kind of vein and not a muscle. With shaking fingers he pressed down the trigger and watched as the substance disappeared into her skin. Almost instantly some color reappeared in her cheeks, and the blood stopped flowing. Peeta just stared at her, feeling such a strong surge of relief that it bordering on odd.

Now that the immediate danger of Clove dying was out of the way and his frantic hands had stilled somewhat, he collected his thoughts. He was for the first time happy he and Katniss had decided to split before it came down to the final eight. She would have been furious if he had showed up with a bleeding Clove in his arms, saying something along the lines of "Can´t we keep her?"

She had left him alone yesterday when she had figured out that the gamekeepers probably would go back on their word and make them kill each other. It had only been a theory of hers to begin with but as they had spent more and more time together she had alone decided that it was better to be safe than sorry and had disappeared during the night with only a message scribbled in mud to assure him of her safety.

In her defense, she had left him with a knife and their small supply of food and her sleeping bag, but his food had disappeared quickly, forcing him to accept the invitation to the feast in order to get some provision. He was still quite bitter about it, but it was Katniss and he couldn´t really blame her.

She did whatever it took to survive.

…

He walked with Clove in his arms for what seemed like at least two hours, but what was only around half an hour. She was surprisingly heavy for her small and lithe form, but he knew from experience that muscles weighed more than fat, and so that seemed only right. He placed her in his sleeping bag, and with nothing else to do, crawled in as well.

From his District Twelve bag, he took out a piece of dried meat before falling into a restless sleep. He woke up five hours later when he felt the sharp edge of a knife pushing against his throat.

"Where am I?" Clove hissed, digging the knife in deeper. She looked positively mad, with messy raven hair and dark, blazing eyes. "Huh, Lover Boy?"

"I took you to a cave." Peeta choked out. His fingers worked nimbly with working their way out of the sleeping bag without Clove noticing.

"_Why _am I in a cave?"

"Because you needed some kind of shelter whilst you recovered. If it makes you feel any better I regret it terribly."

Clove´s hand faltered and after much consideration, she removed it completely and sat down, still looking as if she was an angry animal ready to pounce. She also looked more than a little confused.

"Why would you do that?"

"Because you were dying."

He was met with silence. Clove just stared at him as if he had suddenly grown a second head. If it had not been for the fact that she was a ferocious human being, with nails he suspected should have been claws, he would have felt bad for her. Was it really that confusing that someone had rescued her from dying?

"Cato doesn´t know you´re alive. He went hunting for Thresh, so I would head for the field on the other side of the arena if I were you. He´s probably there if you want to look him up." Peeta muttered. "You don´t owe me anything."

Clove just continued staring at him, deep in thought. Suddenly her gaze hardened and her lips formed a scowl.

"You saved me from dying. Of course I am in your debt." She said the words bitterly and it looked as if she had to force them out of her mouth. "From now on were allies. Just don´t expect me to be nice."

**-Continue or not?-**


	2. Chapter 2

"We need to hunt." Clove exclaimed on their second day as allies. For some reason he didn´t think she meant that she wanted to hunt for animals. With zero tributes dead for the past day, he knew the gamemakers would most likely be turning in their seats right about now, waiting for something to happen. At best, they would let the rest of them play it out by themselves but at the worst, they would probably cause some kind of storm that would draw them all together.

He hoped they would let things run its course, but at the same time he just wanted the whole ordeal to be over. One way or the other, he knew that he would be returning soon, the only question was whether or not it would be in a casket. Now that Katniss had abandoned him the implication that he would die soon had once again entered the picture. First, he had been sure that he would die when Cato had almost sliced his thigh of, but fortunately it had all healed nicely, and now the only thing that reminded him that it had ever been there in the first place was a dull throb he felt in his leg occasionally when he´d used it too much.

After Cato´s attempt to kill him there had been the whole starving thing, and after that came the waking up to find a knife pressing into his throat. All in all, he knew that he had been very lucky to survive as long as he had, and now he even had a psychopath career tribute as an ally.

"If we work quickly we can find your star-crossed lover before sundown and I can give her what she deserves." His eyes snapped over to hers and he could see hate and distain clearly written across her features. Her mouth was in a snarl, and her eyes were blazing the way they only did when she thought of something particularly nasty, but at the same time longing seeped into her voice. A sick lust for torture and blood.

"We won´t be hunting for Katniss." He said sternly and just like that he was one the receiving end of one of her death glares.

"What even happened to you two? Trouble in paradise?"

"You could say that…"

"Oh, how my heart breaks. I was hoping for you to have a tearful reunion filled with sunshine, happiness and a lot of butterflies."

"Yes. You sound truly heartbroken."

"I am. It truly chills my warm heart which is filled with longing for a forbidden romance."

Peeta didn´t bother to reply. As much as he didn´t want to "hunt", the only other option was staying in a cave with a sadistic tiny teenager who could hit a target with a knife from fifty meters away whilst sleeping. Standing up, he dusted his clothes off, ignoring the small stab of pain that came from his left thigh. One of his hands ran though his blonde hair, messing it up instead of making it neater.

"Okay, fine. We will hunt. But there will be no killing or harming Katniss if we encounter her and our main goal is to find food." He gestured towards the frail piece of dried peach that sat on his unoccupied sleeping bag. It was the only food they had left. "We do also not kill tributes if we meet any, and only do so if they attempt to harm us first. Got it?"

"Got it." Clove spat, getting to her feet angrily. Peeta would have compared her to an angry kitten had it not been for the fact that she was as lethal as a lioness.

With an angry growl Clove climbed out of their cave and stepped into the forest. He followed but kept a safe distance from her, letting her calm down somewhat.

…

The forest was unusually intimidating. It seemed hushed and lonely, and not before long he struggled to catch up with her, choosing instead to walk by side by side with her. Knowing that there were only seven people left, chilled him to the bone since he knew that the time would come when they would all battle each other for the last remaining spot. He wondered what Katniss was doing, and if she was OK. As for the rest of them – Cato, Foxface, Thresh and the boy from district 10 who had scored a nine- he just hoped they weren´t anywhere close.

He hoped it wouldn´t come down to Katniss and him. She was unpredictable. With Clove, at least he knew that she would turn on him and kill him. It made knots appear in his stomach, but at the same time it was nice to have some kind of foresight on what would eventually happen.

After an hour of walking through the woods, Clove announced that she was going to separate herself from him and try hunting on her own since she was sure every living thing could hear the commotion he did to the ground only by walking on it. Before he had time to object, she had disappeared without any other weapon to defend himself with other than the lifeless knife they used to cut through bark.

Peeta, who had no idea how to even begin to scavenger for plants or set up snares, climbed up a tree and decided that the best course of action would be to simply observe the forest. Hopefully are rabbit or some other animal would wander into his sight and he could attempt to throw a knife at it. But until then, he amused himself by plucking leaves from the tree and tearing them up.

He had just plucked another one when a scream echoed through the woods. Alarmed, he jumped down from the tree and looked around. A couple of seconds later there was the sound of another one. Peeta took off in its direction.

"CLOVE!" He yelled, and was surprised to hear the distress in his voice. He dashed through the trees whilst attempting to keep the branches from cutting into his skin. A couple of seconds later he entered a small clearing and was relieved to see Clove standing up.

That was, until he saw the body which lay at feet.

He vaguely recognized the dark hair and tan skin that told him that it was the boy from district 10. Feeling as if his breakfast was about to make a visit, he focused his gaze on Clove and away from the bloody body.

Her eyes were glassed over and she looked as if she was about to pass out. What really stood out though was the way she held onto her knife as if it was a matter of live and death. Slowly, he took a step closer, aware that Clove was not herself at the moment.

Her eyes snapped to his, and she was raising the knife, getting ready to throw it.

"Clove...Calm down. He said as soothingly as he could, taking another step towards her. "Drop the knife. Please."

He approached her further, and was just about to take the knife from her hand when she snapped open her eyes, and attacked him. His knee groaned in pain, but it was the least of his problems as he fell down, hitting the ground hard. Clove´s hair was in his face, blinding him temporarily. He was also oddly, reminded of something Katniss´ had said back when they were training for the games. She had said that his strength was something he could use in the arena and he had only answered that unless there were bags of flour in the arena to throw around, it would be useless. Unless, of course, he was going to box and throw punches.

Peeta acted on instinct, and without think much about it, he grabbed what he thought was her shoulders and flipped her over. She stared up at him, her eyes blazing like always. He was however relieved to find that her eyes were clear, even if they were openly asking for his death.

"Get of me, you pervert. Don´t think I´m going to hesitate to kill you if you don't."

He sighed, but got on to his feet.

"Maybe I wouldn´t have had to battle you if you hadn´t attacked me in the first place."

"That was hardly a battle," She scoffed, "I didn´t even try and so it doesn´t count. And for the record if I _had _tried, you would have ended up like that." She pointed a wavering finger at the body laying a couple of feet away and Peeta was reminded why she had been acting the way she had in the first place.

It wasn´t the first time Peeta had seen a dead body. There were incidents when he would go to school and find a dead man leaning against their trashcans. It always made him feel uneasy, but that was the way it had been in District 12. It had also been hard to escape seeing bodies on the day of the cornucopia. Not that he had looked closely anyway.

This time however, it wasn´t just a scrawny, pale, old man he saw but a young olive colored teenager with visible entrails.

Bile rose in his throat and he had to turn away and close his eyes. Clove, in the mean time, just stared at him unimpressed. If it hadn´t been for the barely suppressed quivering of her lips, or her trembling hands, he would have said she did not care that there was a dead boy just steps away from them.

A boy she had killed.


	3. Chapter 3

That night, as he was allowing Clove to sleep for the first couple of hours before she was due to take over; Peeta watched her battle with her own demons for the first time.

It was a relatively calm night outside of their small cave, and the miniature storm which the gamemakers had conjured up on their way home from the fruitful "hunting" had blown over. The damp earth smelled of petrichor, a smell that Peeta had always found comforting. All in all, it looked as if it was going to be a calm night.

That is, until Clove finally fell right into a nightmare that left her whimpering and with tears streaming down her face, leaving Peeta feeling uneasy.

The whole day had left him feeling uneasy, if he was going to be frank about it. Sure, it wasn´t the first time he had seen someone die by unnatural causes, but it was the first time Clove make a kill as his ally. A part of him had also imagined that it had all been an act, the way she was with the rest of the careers. That they urged each other on, making them appear differently.

Surely, someone as tiny as Clove couldn´t be _that _vicious, or _that _bloodthirsty. Unfortunately for him –or fortunately, in a way- that had turned out to be the real Clove, and not just some wicked version of her. It had left him feeling oddly disappointed for some reason as he had always been a firm believer that in people who were like that usually had a reason to be like that.

But Peeta didn´t know her well enough to answer the question of whether she was a psychopath or just misunderstood. Either way, he knew that she was a force to be reckoned with. And a deadly one at that.

The walk back to their cave from the woods had been strained and Clove had seemed exhausted. Peeta had offered to take the first shift and she had just nodded, no other words needed. At the time, he had figured it would be an opportunity to think things through and come to terms about what he wanted to do and how he was about to survive.

He wasn´t naïve enough to believe that he could survive a second out there in the woods alone without an ally. Even now when there were only five people left in the games –they had shown the girl with the red hairs picture in the sky earlier that night- and all of them had higher points than him. For some reason, outside of the ones he had already mentioned, he didn´t like the idea of leaving Clove. Saving someone from death had made him form a bond with her, and as peculiar as it seemed, he didn´t want her to get hurt as well.

Deciding to throw caution out of the wind because he really did not like Clove looking like that, he shuffled closer to her, placing a hand on her shoulder, fully prepared to wake her up. Instead of it having the effect he wanted, which was waking her up and snapping her out of it, her sobs grew rapidly in speed and in sound.

"Clove," He whispered, shaking her and hoping that no one outside of their cave had heard.

"Don't hurt me, please. I promise to be good. I promise." Peeta looked at her pale face, his stomach in knots.

"I´m not going to-"

"Don't hurt me."

He had just realized that she was still asleep when she let out an ear piercing scream and woke up at the sound, looking like she had just broken the surface of water and could finally breathe.

Then she did the unthinkable, she started to cry.

Not the soft, muffled kind of crying that he would have expected, but the full on; _I am having a breakdown right now_, kind of crying.

And then, just he was sure the night could not get any weirder, he surprised himself by putting his arms around her, pressing her tiny form against his chest.

"I didn´t mean to kill him," He heard her say, the voice faint and muffled by his shirt. He didn´t believe the cameras or whatever the gamemakers used could pick up on it. "But he was going to kill me. I had to."

"I know." He whispered, his face in Clove´s raven hair. "It's going to be alright."

Peeta wasn´t sure how long they sat like that; him whispering sweet nothings into her hair, and Clove crying, but eventually she stopped and fell asleep, taking him with her.

He noted though, when he woke up in the cave, dawn breaking outside, that she hadn´t had any more nightmares. For some reason, he felt calm and happy for the first time since he had entered the arena.

A smile spread across his face.

**To be honest, I´m not sure if I am going to end this fanfiction with that note. In a way, it seems almost perfect, but on the other hand I have so much planned, like Clove meeting Cato again, etc, etc. **

**-What do you think? Should I end it with an open ending?-**


End file.
